Swedish Emigration and the Americanization of Sweden: Some Reflections

SWEDISH EMIGRATION AND THE
AMERICANIZATION OF SWEDEN
SOME REFLECTIONS*
TORVALD H Ö J ER
Different opinions are possible on the question if it is
really true to talk about an "Americanization of Sweden."
It is quite evident that Sweden as well as other European
countries, and perhaps more than many of those, has her
own, old-established cultural and social traditions and that
her patterns of society quite as her patterns of education
today are still rather different from American patterns. It
would be rather dangerous to take the phrase Americaniza­tion
of Sweden too literally. Sweden still remains Sweden.
But, on the other hand, many unbiased observers, who
are neither Swedes nor Americans, have strongly main­tained1
that Sweden reminds them of the United States
more than does any other European country, perhaps with
the exception of Western Germany in recent years. It is,
in fact, very easy today to point out things in America and
in Sweden which are vividly reminiscent of each other: a
high and steadily rising standard of life, a fervent interest
in all sorts of gadgets and technical things, a rather ma­terialistic
approach to life, an absence of marked and pro­hibitive
delimitations between social classes, a consistently
democratic outlook on life and society.
There are, of course, behind these similarities also im­portant
differences. Behind the materialistic approach,
which I just mentioned, there is in the United1 States still
an important religious background which one rather seldom
meets in the Sweden of today; personally I think that this
is one of the weakest points in present-day Swedish men­tality.
Another point where national psychology in the two
countries is rather different concerns their attitudes toward
* Lecture delivered at North Park College, Chicago, October 24, 195S.
43
state interference in business life. Socialism—I ought per­haps
to say moderate socialism—has been the dominant
factor in Swedish politics for so long a time that its beliefs
and its theories have to a certain extent permeated even the
non-socialist parties. There exists thus in Sweden today a
general tendency of looking to Government for guidance
and direction in economic things and for support in times
of difficulty. This is a tendency which I suppose not to be
very common in the United States.
I wanted to stress at the start that there still exist those
important differences between Swedish and American phil­osophies
of life and society, for I am not going to speak of
them again. My topic here is the Americanization of Swe­den,
that is to say I shall try to discuss the factors which
have contributed to make present-day Sweden in certain
and important aspects rather similar to the United States.
It is then important to stress that we are here in the pres­ence
of powerful general trends which have been at work
in the whole Occidental world for a century or more.
Everywhere among the Western nations the standard of life
has been mounting, everywhere the interest in technology
has been marked, everywhere materialism has grown since
about 1830, everywhere democracy has advanced and class-barriers
have tended to lessen or to vanish altogether. The
United States has led these developments, and if Sweden
has followed faster and closer in her steps than other Euro­pean
nations, I would suggest two rather evident explana­tions.
Sweden has been allowed to live in uninterrupted
peace for a century and a half. And the general economic
and technological evolution has made her main exports
(high quality steel, iron ore, pulp and paper) more im­portant
and more valuable than ever before and have thus
compensated for her less favored position in regard to
agriculture. Abundant water-power and a fortunate genius
for inventions of great industrial value have also played
their part in bringing Sweden to one of the leading positions
in the march of industrialization and thus also of Ameri­canization.
44
But I suppose that here, in this country, in this great city
which has for so long a time been the most important center
of Swedish-Americans, and at this college, the history of
which is so closely connected with Swedish emigration to
the Middle West, you want me to discuss whether or not
there is to be found a connection between the very large
outflow of Swedes to the United States on one side and
what we just called "the Americanization of Sweden" on
the other.
Let me then say at once, that this is a historical problem
where, as far as I know, not very much of real research
has been made and where we, in consequence, as yet have
but scanty real knowledge. We must realize that at present
we can only put forward guesses and hypotheses. But these
guesses and hypotheses are of a certain value for historical
science, as stimulants for the research which must come and
as vaguely and tentatively showing the lines according to
which that future research ought to be planned. Much more
cannot, as far as I understand, be claimed for our present-day
knowledge of these important problems of recent Swed­ish
history.
If we suppose that political, economic and social develop­ments
in Sweden during the last eighty years have been
to a certain, more or less important, degree influenced by
the Swedish immigrants in the United States, that influence
must mainly have passed through two channels. One is the
so called America-letters, the letters from the emigrants to
their relatives and friends back in Sweden. The other
channel is the rather great number of Swedes who returned
to the mother-country after a more or less prolonged stay
in the United States. A third means of American influence
on things in Sweden, without any direct reference to emi­gration
as such, was the influence of Swedes who came here
not as emigrants but as visitors with the intention of study­ing
certain things and then returning to Sweden to make
their American studies fruitful.
There can be no doubt, that both the America-letters
and the returning emigrants were very important. The
45
number of these last mentioned was fairly high during the
latter part of the emigration-epoch proper, between 4,000
and 5,000 a year. It is also easily possible to mention quite
a number of "returned immigrants" who after their return
made important contributions to Swedish national life in
politics, in business, or in writing. Few, if any of these,
however, belonged to the very first ranks. A rather high
number of case-studies would be necessary to give us real
knowledge of the importance of this factor.
The same applies to a still higher degree to the America-letters.
That their number was very high is sure; that they
often were of great importance for their receivers' general
social and political outlook is extremely probable. But to
form a real idea of their importance an immense number
of case-studies will be necessary, and these studies will
suffer from the special difficulty, that the people who re­ceived
those letters mostly belonged to those groups in
society who rarely preserve their letters and documents.
It will thus, I think, be a rather difficult task to form statisti­cally
well-founded opinions on the America-letters and on
their real importance for Swedish developments in the de­cades
between 1890 and 1930.
There are several very natural reasons why Swedish-
Americans are apt to presume the existence of a rather
close connection between what we here have called the
Americanization of Sweden on one hand and the influence
exercised in Sweden by the Swedish population in America
on the other hand. For that reason it has seemed to me to
be perhaps useful to stress certain arguments against such
a close connection, even if that perhaps is apt to make my
discussion of these problems somewhat lop-sided.
But before proceeding to the arguments against supposing
a very strong Swedish-American influence on develop­ments
in Sweden, I would like to point out that the great
emigration had at least two very important direct effects
in the old country. Sweden's great and very serious social
question in the 19th century was the overpopulation and
ensuing pauperization of the rural districts, the enormous
46
growth in the number of torpare, backstugusittare, inhyses­h
j o n and other lower strata of the agricultural population.
It was impossible to solve inside Sweden the social and eco­nomic
problems created by these developments, as long as
industrialization had not spread in earnest, i.e. before the
turn of the century. The removal through emigration of
this surplus population was thus an indispensable condition
for the raising of the standard of life which took place in
Sweden in the decades around 1900.
The other direct and important consequence of the emi­gration
were the measures taken by Government and Par­liament
in order to stem the flow of population out of the
country, by making Sweden more attractive to the poorly
circumstanced classes of society. These measures particu­larly
aimed at making it easier to acquire land for people
without means. The egnahems-legislation in its different
forms was a direct consequence of emigration.
There are, however, some circumstances which, at least
in my opinion, ought to make us rather cautious when we
now try to theorize about the effects of emigration on Swed­ish
domestic developments.
One is a comparison with certain other European nations.
In several other countries, emigration to the United States,
at least quantitatively, played the same part, or perhaps
even a bigger part than in Sweden, for instance in Ireland,
Italy, and Norway. But few, I think, would speak of an
"Americanization" in present-day Ireland or Italy, and that
phenomenon seems to be much less pronounced in Norway
than in Sweden, in spite of Norwegian emigration being,
from a statistical point of view, still larger than the Swed­ish.
It thus seems to me that we must first have some very
good reasons before we can dare to suppose that there is
in the Swedish case any close correlation or connection be­tween
emigration to the United States and "Americaniza­tion"
in the mother-country, a connection which quite evi­dently
does not exist on the same scale in other comparable
cases.
There are also other circumstances which seem to speak
4 7
against our jumping to positive conclusions in favor of the
existence of such a very close correlation or connection.
Swedish emigration, in its earlier stages and for quite a long
time, had an agricultural background. The people who
emigrated were mostly farmers' sons and agricultural
workers of different kinds who wanted to acquire land of
their own. Their relatives and friends in Sweden, at least
before 1914, were also mainly country people. But the
groups who effected the social, political and economical
changes in Sweden, which we here have labelled as the
"Americanization of Sweden," were not at all agricultural.
They were, partly, the captains of modern Swedish industry
who built the economic foundations of the new, compara­tively
rich Sweden, and, partly, organized labor which ob­tained
a fair part of that new prosperity for the Swedish
working classes and thus set up a new state of social balance.
Most Swedish industrial leaders before 1918 looked to Eng­land
and, still more, to Germany for their ideas and pat­terns.
There were, to be sure, several industrialists who
studied in America even before or about 1900, such as J.
Sigfrid Edström, who, after his American experience (1893-
1897), became in 1903 the chief of A s e a , Sweden's big elec­trical
combine; or Ivar Kreuger, the "match king," who in
his youth spent some years in America. But they and other
industrialists of predominantly American experience and
attachments represented at that time the exceptions rather
than the rule. It was only after the First World War that
Swedish industry turned chiefly to America, and at that
same time emigration ended. The new orientation of Swed­ish
business captains was a consequence not of emigration
but of the general world events which had made the United
States the leaders of the Western world in the economic
field. The enormous numbers of Swedish travels to the
United States for economic and industrial studies belong
to the inter-war years when Swedish emigration had almost
or completely ceased to flow.
The picture will be about the same if we turn to Swedish
labor. The socialist party and the trade unions before 1914
48
looked mostly to their counterparts in the big German so­cialist
party and in the powerful and highly organized Ger­man
trade unions for inspiration, for patterns and for sup­port
in difficult times. And when German predominance in
the labor movement ceased during the First World War,
it was succeeded by close ties to the British Labor Party
and the British trade unions. Only relatively few labor
leaders had American contacts or American experiences.
The unpolitical nature of American labor organizations was
quite different from the continental and Swedish pattern,
where the trade unions and the socialist parties stuck close­ly
together. It was thus rather difficult to form close rela­tions
and exchange of experience and ideas between Swed­ish
and American labor. And as the country of quite un­limited
private enterprise, as the country of John D. Rocke­feller,
the Vanderbilts and the Morgans, the United States
was at that time rather apt to seem suspect in the eyes of
orthodox Marxist Swedish labor.
American influence was thus hardly present in the domi­nant
groups of conservative officials, officers, land-owners
and ironworks-owners around 1900, and only rather feebly
felt in the rising group of modern Swedish industrialists,
who still looked to German heavy industry. Neither were
such influences very typical for organized labor, the force
which was politically to dominate the two Swedish genera­tions
after 1917. Where an American influence was felt and
very strongly felt was among the lower middle-classes of the
cities and in certain parts of the farmer population. These
middle-class groups had good connections with the Swedes
in America, and their many and important organizations
(the Free Churches, the Temperance Movement and others)
were very often formed on an American pattern and in
many cases had direct American affiliations.
There was really a moment in Swedish history when it
seemed that these middle-class groups with their American
and British orientation would come to the forefront politi­cally.
They formed the backbone of the big liberal or radi­cal
party led by Karl Staaff which about 1910 seemed des-
49
tined to dominate Swedish politics for the next generation.
But that powerful radical party was broken by conflicts
over the defense problems in 1914 and never reappeared
as a leading force after 1920. Its political heritage fell to
the socialists, and of their lack of any great interest for
America I have already spoken.
It is perhaps convenient to sum up the points I have tried
to make. What has been called "the Americanization of
Sweden" is largely a result of general international trends
during the life of the last two generations, trends which
have developed particularly rapidly and powerfully in Swe­den
owing to special historical and economic circumstances.
On the other hand there is a strong temptation to try to
trace a close connection between Swedish emigration to
the United States and the "Americanizing" process in Swe­den
herself. Certainly such a connection exists. But we do
not know very much of it today, as there has not been
much adequate historical research-work done on these
things as yet.
There are, however, certain circumstances which, at least
today, seem to warn us from making too audacious guesses
and surmises about such a close connection between emi­gration
to America and "Americanization" in Sweden.
Americanization has not been very rapid or complete in
other countries with a large emigration. And those move­ments
or forces in Sweden which most markedly contributed
to what we have here called the Americanization, i.e. indus­try
and organized labor, did not in the crucial period have
any very close relation to emigration or any particular in­terest
in America. On the other side, the groups where
American influence was strong did only for a rather short
time wield a dominant influence on the evolution of Swedish
society and Swedish politics.
For these reasons I personally believe that emigration
has hardly been the main factor in the "Americanization"
of Sweden, although I readily concede that it certainly
played an important part in that process. And I also con­cede
the possibility that future historical research one day
50
can show us quite another picture of the relations between
the Swedish emigrants and their native country than that
which I have just tried to outline.
EDITOR'S NOTE. The literature on "Americanization" in general and in con­nection
with Sweden in particular is steadily increasing. Most recent overall
treatment is that by Halvdan Koht, The American Spirit in Europe (Phila­delphia,
1949). Eric Fischer in his The Passing of the European Age (Cam­bridge,
1943) has a suggestive chapter on "The Americanization of the World."
A group of writers treat the broad problem in American Influences Abroad,
a pamphlet edited by Richard H. Heindel (Carnegie Foundation, New York,
1950).
More specifically on the "Americanization of Sweden" is the small but
lively book by E. H. Thörnberg, Sverige i Amerika, Amerika i Sverige
(Stockholm, 1938). Also suggestive are the article by Bryn J. Hovde, "Notes
on the Effects of Emigration upon Scandinavia" (Journal of Modern History,
VI [1934], 253-279), and his chapter on emigration and other sections of
The Scandinavian Countries (2 vols., Boston, 1943). A mine of source ma­terial
may be found in the eleven volumes of Emigrationsutredningen (Stock­holm,
1908-1913). A number of brief articles of interest were published in
Nordisk Familjeboks Månadskrönika, for June, 1938. Franklin D. Scott has
published several items, among them "American Influences in Norway and
Sweden" (Journal of Modern History, XVIII [1946], 37-47); "Causes and Con­sequences
of Emigration in Sweden" in The Chronicle of the American Swed­ish
Historical Foundation (Spring, 1955, 2-11); a chapter on "Crosscurrents"
in The United States and Scandinavia (Cambridge, 1950); and The American
Experience of Swedish Students (Minneapolis, 1956). Most recent summary
is O. Fritiof Ander's chapter on "Emigration and Americanization" in his
Modern Sweden (Rock Island, 1958).
51

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SWEDISH EMIGRATION AND THE
AMERICANIZATION OF SWEDEN
SOME REFLECTIONS*
TORVALD H Ö J ER
Different opinions are possible on the question if it is
really true to talk about an "Americanization of Sweden."
It is quite evident that Sweden as well as other European
countries, and perhaps more than many of those, has her
own, old-established cultural and social traditions and that
her patterns of society quite as her patterns of education
today are still rather different from American patterns. It
would be rather dangerous to take the phrase Americaniza­tion
of Sweden too literally. Sweden still remains Sweden.
But, on the other hand, many unbiased observers, who
are neither Swedes nor Americans, have strongly main­tained1
that Sweden reminds them of the United States
more than does any other European country, perhaps with
the exception of Western Germany in recent years. It is,
in fact, very easy today to point out things in America and
in Sweden which are vividly reminiscent of each other: a
high and steadily rising standard of life, a fervent interest
in all sorts of gadgets and technical things, a rather ma­terialistic
approach to life, an absence of marked and pro­hibitive
delimitations between social classes, a consistently
democratic outlook on life and society.
There are, of course, behind these similarities also im­portant
differences. Behind the materialistic approach,
which I just mentioned, there is in the United1 States still
an important religious background which one rather seldom
meets in the Sweden of today; personally I think that this
is one of the weakest points in present-day Swedish men­tality.
Another point where national psychology in the two
countries is rather different concerns their attitudes toward
* Lecture delivered at North Park College, Chicago, October 24, 195S.
43
state interference in business life. Socialism—I ought per­haps
to say moderate socialism—has been the dominant
factor in Swedish politics for so long a time that its beliefs
and its theories have to a certain extent permeated even the
non-socialist parties. There exists thus in Sweden today a
general tendency of looking to Government for guidance
and direction in economic things and for support in times
of difficulty. This is a tendency which I suppose not to be
very common in the United States.
I wanted to stress at the start that there still exist those
important differences between Swedish and American phil­osophies
of life and society, for I am not going to speak of
them again. My topic here is the Americanization of Swe­den,
that is to say I shall try to discuss the factors which
have contributed to make present-day Sweden in certain
and important aspects rather similar to the United States.
It is then important to stress that we are here in the pres­ence
of powerful general trends which have been at work
in the whole Occidental world for a century or more.
Everywhere among the Western nations the standard of life
has been mounting, everywhere the interest in technology
has been marked, everywhere materialism has grown since
about 1830, everywhere democracy has advanced and class-barriers
have tended to lessen or to vanish altogether. The
United States has led these developments, and if Sweden
has followed faster and closer in her steps than other Euro­pean
nations, I would suggest two rather evident explana­tions.
Sweden has been allowed to live in uninterrupted
peace for a century and a half. And the general economic
and technological evolution has made her main exports
(high quality steel, iron ore, pulp and paper) more im­portant
and more valuable than ever before and have thus
compensated for her less favored position in regard to
agriculture. Abundant water-power and a fortunate genius
for inventions of great industrial value have also played
their part in bringing Sweden to one of the leading positions
in the march of industrialization and thus also of Ameri­canization.
44
But I suppose that here, in this country, in this great city
which has for so long a time been the most important center
of Swedish-Americans, and at this college, the history of
which is so closely connected with Swedish emigration to
the Middle West, you want me to discuss whether or not
there is to be found a connection between the very large
outflow of Swedes to the United States on one side and
what we just called "the Americanization of Sweden" on
the other.
Let me then say at once, that this is a historical problem
where, as far as I know, not very much of real research
has been made and where we, in consequence, as yet have
but scanty real knowledge. We must realize that at present
we can only put forward guesses and hypotheses. But these
guesses and hypotheses are of a certain value for historical
science, as stimulants for the research which must come and
as vaguely and tentatively showing the lines according to
which that future research ought to be planned. Much more
cannot, as far as I understand, be claimed for our present-day
knowledge of these important problems of recent Swed­ish
history.
If we suppose that political, economic and social develop­ments
in Sweden during the last eighty years have been
to a certain, more or less important, degree influenced by
the Swedish immigrants in the United States, that influence
must mainly have passed through two channels. One is the
so called America-letters, the letters from the emigrants to
their relatives and friends back in Sweden. The other
channel is the rather great number of Swedes who returned
to the mother-country after a more or less prolonged stay
in the United States. A third means of American influence
on things in Sweden, without any direct reference to emi­gration
as such, was the influence of Swedes who came here
not as emigrants but as visitors with the intention of study­ing
certain things and then returning to Sweden to make
their American studies fruitful.
There can be no doubt, that both the America-letters
and the returning emigrants were very important. The
45
number of these last mentioned was fairly high during the
latter part of the emigration-epoch proper, between 4,000
and 5,000 a year. It is also easily possible to mention quite
a number of "returned immigrants" who after their return
made important contributions to Swedish national life in
politics, in business, or in writing. Few, if any of these,
however, belonged to the very first ranks. A rather high
number of case-studies would be necessary to give us real
knowledge of the importance of this factor.
The same applies to a still higher degree to the America-letters.
That their number was very high is sure; that they
often were of great importance for their receivers' general
social and political outlook is extremely probable. But to
form a real idea of their importance an immense number
of case-studies will be necessary, and these studies will
suffer from the special difficulty, that the people who re­ceived
those letters mostly belonged to those groups in
society who rarely preserve their letters and documents.
It will thus, I think, be a rather difficult task to form statisti­cally
well-founded opinions on the America-letters and on
their real importance for Swedish developments in the de­cades
between 1890 and 1930.
There are several very natural reasons why Swedish-
Americans are apt to presume the existence of a rather
close connection between what we here have called the
Americanization of Sweden on one hand and the influence
exercised in Sweden by the Swedish population in America
on the other hand. For that reason it has seemed to me to
be perhaps useful to stress certain arguments against such
a close connection, even if that perhaps is apt to make my
discussion of these problems somewhat lop-sided.
But before proceeding to the arguments against supposing
a very strong Swedish-American influence on develop­ments
in Sweden, I would like to point out that the great
emigration had at least two very important direct effects
in the old country. Sweden's great and very serious social
question in the 19th century was the overpopulation and
ensuing pauperization of the rural districts, the enormous
46
growth in the number of torpare, backstugusittare, inhyses­h
j o n and other lower strata of the agricultural population.
It was impossible to solve inside Sweden the social and eco­nomic
problems created by these developments, as long as
industrialization had not spread in earnest, i.e. before the
turn of the century. The removal through emigration of
this surplus population was thus an indispensable condition
for the raising of the standard of life which took place in
Sweden in the decades around 1900.
The other direct and important consequence of the emi­gration
were the measures taken by Government and Par­liament
in order to stem the flow of population out of the
country, by making Sweden more attractive to the poorly
circumstanced classes of society. These measures particu­larly
aimed at making it easier to acquire land for people
without means. The egnahems-legislation in its different
forms was a direct consequence of emigration.
There are, however, some circumstances which, at least
in my opinion, ought to make us rather cautious when we
now try to theorize about the effects of emigration on Swed­ish
domestic developments.
One is a comparison with certain other European nations.
In several other countries, emigration to the United States,
at least quantitatively, played the same part, or perhaps
even a bigger part than in Sweden, for instance in Ireland,
Italy, and Norway. But few, I think, would speak of an
"Americanization" in present-day Ireland or Italy, and that
phenomenon seems to be much less pronounced in Norway
than in Sweden, in spite of Norwegian emigration being,
from a statistical point of view, still larger than the Swed­ish.
It thus seems to me that we must first have some very
good reasons before we can dare to suppose that there is
in the Swedish case any close correlation or connection be­tween
emigration to the United States and "Americaniza­tion"
in the mother-country, a connection which quite evi­dently
does not exist on the same scale in other comparable
cases.
There are also other circumstances which seem to speak
4 7
against our jumping to positive conclusions in favor of the
existence of such a very close correlation or connection.
Swedish emigration, in its earlier stages and for quite a long
time, had an agricultural background. The people who
emigrated were mostly farmers' sons and agricultural
workers of different kinds who wanted to acquire land of
their own. Their relatives and friends in Sweden, at least
before 1914, were also mainly country people. But the
groups who effected the social, political and economical
changes in Sweden, which we here have labelled as the
"Americanization of Sweden," were not at all agricultural.
They were, partly, the captains of modern Swedish industry
who built the economic foundations of the new, compara­tively
rich Sweden, and, partly, organized labor which ob­tained
a fair part of that new prosperity for the Swedish
working classes and thus set up a new state of social balance.
Most Swedish industrial leaders before 1918 looked to Eng­land
and, still more, to Germany for their ideas and pat­terns.
There were, to be sure, several industrialists who
studied in America even before or about 1900, such as J.
Sigfrid Edström, who, after his American experience (1893-
1897), became in 1903 the chief of A s e a , Sweden's big elec­trical
combine; or Ivar Kreuger, the "match king," who in
his youth spent some years in America. But they and other
industrialists of predominantly American experience and
attachments represented at that time the exceptions rather
than the rule. It was only after the First World War that
Swedish industry turned chiefly to America, and at that
same time emigration ended. The new orientation of Swed­ish
business captains was a consequence not of emigration
but of the general world events which had made the United
States the leaders of the Western world in the economic
field. The enormous numbers of Swedish travels to the
United States for economic and industrial studies belong
to the inter-war years when Swedish emigration had almost
or completely ceased to flow.
The picture will be about the same if we turn to Swedish
labor. The socialist party and the trade unions before 1914
48
looked mostly to their counterparts in the big German so­cialist
party and in the powerful and highly organized Ger­man
trade unions for inspiration, for patterns and for sup­port
in difficult times. And when German predominance in
the labor movement ceased during the First World War,
it was succeeded by close ties to the British Labor Party
and the British trade unions. Only relatively few labor
leaders had American contacts or American experiences.
The unpolitical nature of American labor organizations was
quite different from the continental and Swedish pattern,
where the trade unions and the socialist parties stuck close­ly
together. It was thus rather difficult to form close rela­tions
and exchange of experience and ideas between Swed­ish
and American labor. And as the country of quite un­limited
private enterprise, as the country of John D. Rocke­feller,
the Vanderbilts and the Morgans, the United States
was at that time rather apt to seem suspect in the eyes of
orthodox Marxist Swedish labor.
American influence was thus hardly present in the domi­nant
groups of conservative officials, officers, land-owners
and ironworks-owners around 1900, and only rather feebly
felt in the rising group of modern Swedish industrialists,
who still looked to German heavy industry. Neither were
such influences very typical for organized labor, the force
which was politically to dominate the two Swedish genera­tions
after 1917. Where an American influence was felt and
very strongly felt was among the lower middle-classes of the
cities and in certain parts of the farmer population. These
middle-class groups had good connections with the Swedes
in America, and their many and important organizations
(the Free Churches, the Temperance Movement and others)
were very often formed on an American pattern and in
many cases had direct American affiliations.
There was really a moment in Swedish history when it
seemed that these middle-class groups with their American
and British orientation would come to the forefront politi­cally.
They formed the backbone of the big liberal or radi­cal
party led by Karl Staaff which about 1910 seemed des-
49
tined to dominate Swedish politics for the next generation.
But that powerful radical party was broken by conflicts
over the defense problems in 1914 and never reappeared
as a leading force after 1920. Its political heritage fell to
the socialists, and of their lack of any great interest for
America I have already spoken.
It is perhaps convenient to sum up the points I have tried
to make. What has been called "the Americanization of
Sweden" is largely a result of general international trends
during the life of the last two generations, trends which
have developed particularly rapidly and powerfully in Swe­den
owing to special historical and economic circumstances.
On the other hand there is a strong temptation to try to
trace a close connection between Swedish emigration to
the United States and the "Americanizing" process in Swe­den
herself. Certainly such a connection exists. But we do
not know very much of it today, as there has not been
much adequate historical research-work done on these
things as yet.
There are, however, certain circumstances which, at least
today, seem to warn us from making too audacious guesses
and surmises about such a close connection between emi­gration
to America and "Americanization" in Sweden.
Americanization has not been very rapid or complete in
other countries with a large emigration. And those move­ments
or forces in Sweden which most markedly contributed
to what we have here called the Americanization, i.e. indus­try
and organized labor, did not in the crucial period have
any very close relation to emigration or any particular in­terest
in America. On the other side, the groups where
American influence was strong did only for a rather short
time wield a dominant influence on the evolution of Swedish
society and Swedish politics.
For these reasons I personally believe that emigration
has hardly been the main factor in the "Americanization"
of Sweden, although I readily concede that it certainly
played an important part in that process. And I also con­cede
the possibility that future historical research one day
50
can show us quite another picture of the relations between
the Swedish emigrants and their native country than that
which I have just tried to outline.
EDITOR'S NOTE. The literature on "Americanization" in general and in con­nection
with Sweden in particular is steadily increasing. Most recent overall
treatment is that by Halvdan Koht, The American Spirit in Europe (Phila­delphia,
1949). Eric Fischer in his The Passing of the European Age (Cam­bridge,
1943) has a suggestive chapter on "The Americanization of the World."
A group of writers treat the broad problem in American Influences Abroad,
a pamphlet edited by Richard H. Heindel (Carnegie Foundation, New York,
1950).
More specifically on the "Americanization of Sweden" is the small but
lively book by E. H. Thörnberg, Sverige i Amerika, Amerika i Sverige
(Stockholm, 1938). Also suggestive are the article by Bryn J. Hovde, "Notes
on the Effects of Emigration upon Scandinavia" (Journal of Modern History,
VI [1934], 253-279), and his chapter on emigration and other sections of
The Scandinavian Countries (2 vols., Boston, 1943). A mine of source ma­terial
may be found in the eleven volumes of Emigrationsutredningen (Stock­holm,
1908-1913). A number of brief articles of interest were published in
Nordisk Familjeboks Månadskrönika, for June, 1938. Franklin D. Scott has
published several items, among them "American Influences in Norway and
Sweden" (Journal of Modern History, XVIII [1946], 37-47); "Causes and Con­sequences
of Emigration in Sweden" in The Chronicle of the American Swed­ish
Historical Foundation (Spring, 1955, 2-11); a chapter on "Crosscurrents"
in The United States and Scandinavia (Cambridge, 1950); and The American
Experience of Swedish Students (Minneapolis, 1956). Most recent summary
is O. Fritiof Ander's chapter on "Emigration and Americanization" in his
Modern Sweden (Rock Island, 1958).
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